Nuclear Fusion

[Briar Lee]

Here are the potential benefits of nuclear fusion:

—-
Abundant energy: Fusing atoms together in a controlled way releases nearly four million times more energy than a chemical reaction such as the burning of coal, oil or gas and four times as much as nuclear fission reactions (at equal mass). Fusion has the potential to provide the kind of baseload energy needed to provide electricity to our cities and our industries.

Sustainability: Fusion in ITER will require two elements: deuterium and tritium. Deuterium can be distilled from all forms of water, while tritium will be produced during the fusion reaction as fusion neutrons interact with lithium. (Terrestrial reserves of lithium would permit the operation of fusion power plants for more than 1,000 years, while sea-based reserves of lithium would fulfil needs for millions of years.) A critical challenge is how to breed and recover tritium reliably in a fusion device.

No CO₂: Fusion doesn't emit harmful toxins like carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Its major by-product is helium: an inert, non-toxic gas.

No long-lived radioactive waste: Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is anticipated to be low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years, depending on the materials used in the "first-wall" facing the plasma.

Limited risk of proliferation: Fusion doesn't employ fissile materials like uranium and plutonium. (Radioactive tritium is neither a fissile nor a fissionable material.) There are no enriched materials in a fusion reactor like ITER that could be exploited to make nuclear weapons.

No risk of meltdown: A Fukushima-type nuclear accident is not possible in a tokamak fusion device. It is difficult enough to reach and maintain the precise conditions necessary for fusion—if any disturbance occurs, the plasma cools within seconds and the reaction stops. The quantity of fuel present in the vessel at any one time is enough for a few seconds only and there is no risk of a chain reaction.

Cost: The power output of the kind of fusion reactor that is envisaged for the second half of this century would likely be similar to that of a fission reactor (i.e., between 1 and 1.7 gigawatts). The average cost per kilowatt of electricity can not yet be extrapolated, however, as this would require the operational experience which will only be available after ITER has been operated for some years. As with many new technologies, costs will be more expensive at first, when the technology is new, and gradually less expensive as economies of scale bring the costs down.

—-

Today, America gets about 20% of its electrical power from fission nuclear plants, and building and powering those plants hasn’t busted us, yet.

The tree huggers and do gooders in the USA have successfully blocked all new nuclear power plants since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, except one.

Those nuclear plants produce power at three cents a kilowatt hour, and coal, gas, and wind are about double that much.

Nuclear fusion, will allow a little baby girl today to live out her last years eighty years from now in a little house when she’s a widow depending on Social Security.

A convoy cannot go faster, than the speed of it’s slowest ship.

Neither can the race of man.

 

[sablebrush52]

This is an evolutionary step more akin to the first harnessing fire or first utterance or first purpose made tools than say a steam engine or the printing press. Fire is to nuclear fusion what a crude scrawling of a line or circle in the dirt is to the Principia Mathematica.

And, I suspect this is not the complete news. Some months ago, I heard from a trustworthy little bird who has a lobbyist for their textile business in the Carolinas that just so happens to also lobby Washington for these folks out of California: they don't dare divulge the truth of their ability to generate Kwhs of electricity because it would upend global markets in a dramatic way and cause inestimable economic chaos. That being said, the little tidbit I was dropped some six or eight months ago was as follows:

A small nuclear fusion reactor went online in a test run in spring of 2022 in NC and powered 20,000 homes for some hours before being shut down. The Pentagon and major energy corporations are aware of the technology, and are trying to figure out how to integrate it without excess disruption or starting some sort of conflict.

This the gist paraphrased from that little bird's chirp I was privy to. All of this, I realize, should be taken with a grain of salt, as no one here knows me from Joseph. I too remain a skeptic, but am not at all surprised and look forward to speaking to that little bird again to confirm it to be the very same Cal. Laboratories that we discussed this past spring. I suppose I share it for novelty sake. If true, it surely is an exciting time to be alive.

Sounds like a story. Something like this would have leaked out. Government scientists are lousy at keeping secrets. Goes against their grain of sharing knowledge to speed up solutions, something pols and vested interests hate.
My brother, a theoretical physicist, was a project leader at Los Alamos until he retired and went into technology development in the private sector. He still had his contacts with LA and NAOS, etc, and, being one of the brighter lights in the physics firmament, was kept in the loop on a lot of research and development. We talked about fusion power, which he believed could eventually be achieved, but there was a long way to go before that happened, assuming we didn't exterminate ourselves.

 

[sablebrush52]

No long-lived radioactive waste: Nuclear fusion reactors produce no high activity, long-lived nuclear waste. The activation of components in a fusion reactor is anticipated to be low enough for the materials to be recycled or reused within 100 years, depending on the materials used in the "first-wall" facing the plasma.

This is a big issue I have with nuclear fission plants. The waste products are deadly for close to a quarter of a million years before becoming inert. Anyone ever tried storing something for 250,000 years, or know of a stable society that's lasted that long?

 

[Winnipeger]

So we're like 1/400 till the expected target and probably a few decades away. But we're slowly moving in the right direction.

Pretty much. And we were like 0/400 before this week. 70 years of failure fallowed by a single positive test result. This research may accelerate quicker than we expect in coming years mind-you.

 

[jguss]

Anyone ever tried storing something for 250,000 years…?

I have some 250,000 year old Capstan that’s frickin’ amazing.

 

[vates]

Pretty much. And we were like 0/400 before this week. 70 years of failure fallowed by a single positive test result. This research may accelerate quicker than we expect in coming years mind-you.

Hope so.

 

[bullet08]

Someone came out to my house the other day saying he wants to talk about installing solar panels on my roof. He was lucky I was in rather less than perfect crappy mood. Told him I don't want any solar panels. Had better response, but it was late at night.

 

[sablebrush52]

I have some 250,000 year old Capstan that’s frickin’ amazing.

Especially when it glows in the dark!

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Someone came out to my house the other day saying he wants to talk about installing solar panels on my roof. He was lucky I was in rather less than perfect crappy mood. Told him I don't want any solar panels. Had better response, but it was late at night.

I did, and I haven't paid a power bill in 8 years. Instead I get the occasional check for $50-120. In NC, the power company installed them for us at no cost, and we still get a check. I'm not sure why people are so opposed to it. We've yet to ever run a battery down. We always tend to generate much more than we use, and we leave lights on and run the hvac all year. I also push the thing when I am casting, running a kiln, vacuum pumps, and an electric furnace for hours, and still, we get checks.

 

[georged]

Anyone ever tried storing something for 250,000 years, or know of a stable society that's lasted that long?

Not a problem.

Just shoot it into orbit around the Earth!

Oh, wait...

That Disney-esque fantasy of the early Space Age isn't working out the way they thought it would either, is it?

Why does EVERYTHING humans want to do get messed with by physics, reality, and the rest of that annoying stuff???

Kessler syndrome - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Andriko]

vates pretty much sums up the truth of all this fusion stuff. Every few months there is a 'breakthrough', but the true out put is usually 0.01% of total in put into the system. On top of that, special isotopes of Hydrogen are required, and manufacturing those has it's own set of serious problems.

I suspect fusion power is just another special interest leeching money off of big government for no benefit. Eisenhower warned us all about this in the 50s.

 

[georged]

Eisenhower warned us all about this in the 50s.

Indeed.

The MIC has since realized that "doubling down" is built into the system, too, because technical advancement requires constantly increasing effort and expense to accomplish.

How much was involved, say, a hundred years ago to make a bigger artillery piece? After allowing for some factors that could be taken care of by a few guys with slide rules, you just scaled up the old one.

Ditto vehicles, airplanes, bombs, etc.

Today? Upgrade a B-2 bomber? That'll be 730 million each, thank you very much, take a decade to accomplish, and when the project is complete will have cost a fifth of a trillion dollars.

By which time the entire concept will probably have been rendered obsolete for some reason.

 

[mso489]

I don't know about any fission reactors in North Carolina. I do know, working with a biomedical science organization for decades, people sometimes get notions that researchers have done work far in advance of what has actually been done and insist upon it.

I once spent a miserable week with a foreign TV crew trying to unearth science they were sure our organization had done. We were groundbreaking on the subject, but it had not advanced nearly as far as they assumed. If we had, we would have shouted it to the treetops.

But they naively insisted we were withholding the research, tried to bribe one or two of the scientists around the edges to get video and data, and generally caused a ruckus. I had one six-foot four scientist literally run from me because he didn't want to talk to these people. What a debacle.

In my whole career, that was the only time I came to the place where my only option for my employer was to play the bad guy and lower the boom on these people. It had to be done with care, to not cause an international incident, but the line had to be drawn. That was my one Chuck Norris moment in life.

 

[Zeno Marx]

I believe they show the lasers in this, if not a representation of the lasers.

Breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology could dramatically alter clean energy landscape

For the first time, scientists have produced a fusion reaction that created more energy than was expended, a breakthrough to tap into the same kind of energy that powers the sun and stars. It could have huge implications for potentially creating clean and limitless energy. Science Correspondent...

www.pbs.org

 

[gamzultovah]

You talking about the fusion or the nuclear waste chief?

You’re funny. You can stay, but the rest of these guys gotta go…

 

[renfield]

Especially when it glows in the dark!

That’s how you know it’s plume and not mold.

 

[Winnipeger]

vates pretty much sums up the truth of all this fusion stuff. Every few months there is a 'breakthrough', but the true out put is usually 0.01% of total in put into the system. On top of that, special isotopes of Hydrogen are required, and manufacturing those has it's own set of serious problems.

I suspect fusion power is just another special interest leeching money off of big government for no benefit. Eisenhower warned us all about this in the 50s.

The U.S. government invests around $700 million in fusion research per year. What's the defence budget? Around $800 billion? Pushing a trillion? The U'S. lags behind France, the U.K., China and Japan in fusion research expenditure. I don't think Eisenhower was warning against research in physics. I think he was warning against letting the defence budget reach a trillion dollars. It's insane. And he was right. But his warning achieved nothing, unfortunately.

Now:

"Fusing atoms together in a controlled way releases nearly four million times more energy than a chemical reaction such as the burning of coal, oil or gas and four times as much as nuclear fission reactions (at equal mass)."

[Advantages of fusion - https://www.iter.org/sci/Fusion#:~:text=Abundant%20energy%3A%20Fusing%20atoms%20together,reactions%20(at%20equal%20mass).]

The point of pursuing fusion research is ultimately that a reactor will conceivably produce so much energy once it gets going that it will power itself, and the excess energy will power society. It's not there at the moment. Not even close. But it is theoretically possible, and as far as a breakthrough "every few months": no. That's not the case. The breakthrough announced in the U.S. this week was the first of its kind.

 

[brian64]

I don't think Eisenhower was warning against research in physics. I think he was warning against letting the defence budget reach a trillion dollars. It's insane. And he was right. But his warning achieved nothing, unfortunately.

Yes, unfortunately it did achieve nothing. But the pertinent section says a lot of significant things that are well worth revisiting often:

January 1961:

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address (1961)

EnlargeDownload Link Citation: Farewell address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961; Final TV Talk 1/17/61 (1), Box 38, Speech Series, Papers of Dwight D.

www.archives.gov

 

[Winnipeger]

we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

And has that happened? I guess it could be argued. But nobody is profiting off of fusion energy at this point, so it seems funny to argue against something that is essentially purely experimental, on the grounds of it being a special interest, sapping government resources. How much money did the U.S. give to the banking industry in 2008 for example? You want to talk about the government becoming captive to elites? It's not experimental physics that is the problem. Give me a break. They're talking about sending men back to the moon, and on to Mars. Talk about a waste of resources.

On the other hand, it makes sense to invest in this kind of physics research because it could be hugely beneficial to society in the long run. It seems like the U.S. government is underinvesting in this sort of research, for obvious reasons. It's not popular, nor is it well understood by most voters. I'm glad some governments have the foresight to continue allocating at least some resources into the frontiers of scientific research that is not motivated purely by short-term private profit. In reality of course, in a world with abundant free energy, I'm sure an elite class would find a way to introduce scarcity and exploitation into the system. But we'd likely still be better off.

The funny thing is, I'm probably coming off as some sort of techno-optimist, and I'm far from it. I just think physics is cool. I'm deeply sceptical that we're heading in the right direction as a society, or that science will save us. BUT after 70 years of failed experiments, a positive result is pretty cool.

 

[brian64]

And has that happened? I guess it could be argued. But nobody is profiting off of fusion energy at this point, so it seems funny to argue against something that is essentially purely experimental, on the grounds of it being a special interest, sapping government resources. How much money did the U.S. give to the banking industry in 2008 for example? You want to talk about the government becoming captive to elites? It's not experimental physics that is the problem. Give me a break. They're talking about sending men back to the moon, and on to Mars. Talk about a waste of resources.

On the other hand, it makes sense to invest in this kind of physics research because it could be hugely beneficial to society in the long run. It seems like the U.S. government is underinvesting in this sort of research, for obvious reasons. It's not popular, nor is it well understood by most voters. I'm glad some governments have the foresight to continue allocating at least some resources into the frontiers of scientific research that is not motivated purely by short-term private profit. In reality of course, in a world with abundant free energy, I'm sure an elite class would find a way to introduce scarcity and exploitation into the system. But we'd likely still be better off.

The funny thing is, I'm probably coming off as some sort of techno-optimist, and I'm far from it. I just think physics is cool. I'm deeply sceptical that we're heading in the right direction as a society, or that science will save us. BUT after 70 years of failed experiments, a positive result is pretty cool.

No, I wasn't even thinking in terms of relating it to the fusion thing...but it's certainly applicable to a number of other big issues these days.